SEATTLE, Wa. — When it comes to the science of sleep, a new study goes after some myths about you and your sleep.
It looked at the effects of caffeine, then added alcohol the same day.
Our sister station KIRO 7 in Seattle found answers that surprised even the researchers.
It’s no surprise that drinking alcohol before bed isn’t good for you or your beauty sleep.
“What we found is as expected, alcohol had a negative effect on sleep quality to the tune of up to 4% decline in subjective sleep quality for each glass of alcohol consumed,” Frank Song, a researcher at the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Beavhoir Sciences said.
In a six-week study, Song and his co-author Dr. Matthew Walker studied the effects of caffeine and alcohol consumption in real-world scenarios with 17 different people.
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They found that consuming alcohol alone had negative effects on sleep but when adding caffeine into the mix there was a much different reaction.
“When you have nights of consuming both alcohol and caffeine, we had initially expected that we would find a double negative effect on quality of sleep and duration of sleep but what we found is the opposite,” Song said.
Song and his co-author found that based on evidence they had collected, people were using caffeine and alcohol to balance out their sleep quality.
“This intrigued us because it provides an explanation for why we use these substances together,” Song said. “At the same time, it raises concerns because this is not to suggest that mixing these two substances is truly beneficial for your sleep; rather it suggests there is a misperception in the sleep state.”
And by misperception in sleep state, that means essentially the two substances are masking the negative effects on each other, making you believe that after a night of drinking, something that already negatively impacts your sleep quality by itself is offset with the illusion that you slept better because caffeine in the morning makes you feel more alert and coherent.